|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: michael pugliese
||
|| The 33,000-40,000 Kurds killed by NATO ally Turkey (higher
|| figure from Chomsky's American Intervention book recently published
|| in Turkey)
|| are, of course, a horrendous bloodletting.
Yes but whose blood? Or doesn't that count? At least 10K are Turkish army. Around 20K are ARGK combatants. Comparing Saddam's Halabja massacre with casualties of war is really smart. There are no independently verifiable statistics but noncombatant deaths are definitely under 10K, and not a few of those are the PKK's doing. Let me also remind you - I've posted at length about this - that the PKK was winning the war until 1995. If the Turkish army hadn't developed an effective conterinsurgency strategy and continued to bleed, you guys would be cheering stalinist drug warlord Ocalan now. Don't know if you caught that news item but during Ocalan's trial some Turks burned themselves outside the courtroom. The rest went and voted fascist because the fascists were the only ones who said they'd hang Ocalan. He still represents the Kurds, does he? Well then why won't they vote for HADEP en masse? Why did they pour out on the street for the funeral cortege of the Diyarbakir police chief who was murdered - allegedly - by Hezbollah?
You know, this western leftie tendency to bundle up entirely different societies and states (Russia,Turkey,Irak,etc) into a catch-all category of ethnic cleansers, it looks a lot like the dimwitted arrogance that produced the "axis of evil".
Hakki